The Disappearance of Grace by Vincent Zandri

married?” she poses, that red flush returning to her cheeks.
    â€œDivorced,” I nod, holding up my left hand and one lonely ring finger. Then, “I have a son who’s not too much younger than you.”
    â€œI’m thirty three,” she admits beaming the same smile.
    â€œAnd all’s fair,” I tell her. “Even if I’m old.”
    â€œYes, you are an old man. All of what? Forty. Forty one?”
    â€œForty something,” I correct her. I don’t tell her my oldest son was born when I was only nineteen. I also don’t bother telling her I haven’t spoken with him since I left for Afghanistan more than a year and a half ago.
    She nurses her tea and I sip my cappuccino and eventually she gets around to asking me if I wouldn’t mind taking a look at some of the pages she’s written for what she hopes will become her first novel. She has them in her bag. It would only take a moment. She would understand if I’m too busy with the conference, or if I’m too busy in general. She doesn’t want not to be polite.
    I stop her. Mid-Sentence.
    â€œI’d love to,” I say, finishing my coffee. “Maybe we can find some quiet space in my hotel. And something a little harder to drink.”
    New York is teeming with cars speeding past on Park Avenue, hordes of suited workers and poorly dressed tourists crowding the sidewalks and the din of thousands of conversations going on all at once.
    But somehow the whole world stands still.
    Grace gets up, looks one way and then the other, and with her eyes peering not at me, but up past the glass and steel towers at the blue heavens, she says, “Okay. Yes. Why the hell not?”
    * * *
    We’re not three feet inside the hotel room before our mouths are locked and I’m undressing her and she’s undressing me. We leave a trail of jeans, underwear, coats and sweaters that leads to the queen-sized bed. It’s all very awkward and first-timey and at one point, we both start laughing out loud and I am able to feel more at one with her as I enter inside her, our hips pressed together, her wet heat surrounding my hardness tightly, drawing me further and further in until we both come to that place at the same time.
    Afterwards, she lies with her head on my chest and I’m running the fingers on my right hand through her lush hair. I ask her to tell me about her husband. What’s his name, for starters.
    â€œAndrew,” she whispers after a weighted pause in which her entire body goes perfectly still. “And I love him. Love him very much.”
    This proves it, I want to tell her. But I don’t, because this…what we’ve just done…doesn’t prove anything. Only that it’s very possible she could also fall in love with me.
    She begins to tell me a little about him. Snippets really. Little facts about the life. His life. That he’s a full professor at the university. That he’s a musician. That he’s one of the most loving and open men she’s ever known. Then without trying, she reveals something that might explain this. Explain us in bed, that is. Here and now.
    â€œWe’ve been together for sixteen years,” she exhales.
    I allow the fact to sink in.
    â€œAlmost a full half of your life,” I say, my fingers dancing in her thick brunette hair.
    â€œI never looked at it that way. But yes, half my life.”
    I feel the heavy profoundness that can only come from our mutually staring out into the same space at the same time inside a cheesy New York Marriott hotel room. But then I also feel her fingers running down my chest and down my belly. When they find me she begins to work on me again. She uses her mouth and when I come she does not remove it. I return the favor by going down on her and afterwards we get out of bed to take a shower together. I slip on the porcelain and she reaches out and catches me before I fall, but not before I tear the